Paul Gent reviews Child of Our Time, in which Professor Robert Winston catches
up with the 25 children BBC One has been following since their birth in the
year 2000.

Child of Our Time (BBC One) is a long-term project in which a camera crew revisits children at regular intervals as they grow up. Sound familiar at all?

Of course it does – the legendary Up series, started in 1964 and causing a stir every seven years when it returns – has a similar premise. The distinctive features of Child of Our Time are that it films the children much more frequently, starting at birth, and that the 25 children are millennium babies.

So why was yesterday’s latest instalment of Child of Our Time, ooh, 20 times duller than Up? It was only partly due to the blandly generalising voice-over of Professor Robert Winston (I swear he has the world’s only audible moustache). It was also to do with the children themselves. They were filmed coming up to 13, and the programme made much of this being an age of transition from childhood to adulthood. But they were all so damned pleasant and reasonable. I could have done with more like Rhianna, who was obsessed with money and liked the idea of turning old people into soup.

What Child of Our Time lacked was Up’s beady-eyed focus on class. Where were the poor and the rich here, the common and the posh? We’re all middle-class now, it seems.

The problem may be that we have all become more telly-literate. We know how intrusive and upsetting it can be to have your life displayed on the nation’s TV screens, your social status open to mockery. So parents must have either said no when the producers knocked on their door, or controlled what they revealed. Maybe Child of Our Time is dull because Up poisoned the well.

You can take comfort from all the middle-of-the-road normality, of course. It could mean we’re all better-adjusted these days. Taliesin was being bullied so his mum put him in another school and he’s now a delightful, thoughtful boy. Tennis prodigy William was feeling the pressure so his mum had a heart-to-heart with him and they dropped the tennis. She, too, had her own moment of crisis, regretting the independent life she could have led as a City solicitor instead of a housewife; but in the end her children were more important to her.

Finally, a word of advice to the feisty Helena, who wants to become a journalist. Don’t – we’re a bunch of cynics who like nothing better than pouring cold water on a well-meaning and at times heart-warming programme.